Towards an infrastructure enabling the internet of production

New levels of cross-domain collaboration between manufacturing companies throughout the supply chain are anticipated to bring benefits to both suppliers and consumers of products. Enabling a fine-grained sharing and analysis of data among different stakeholders in an automated manner, such a vision of an Internet of Production (IoP) introduces demanding challenges to the communication, storage, and computation infrastructure in production environments. In this work, we present three example cases that would benefit from an IoP (a fine blanking line, a high pressure die casting process, and a connected job shop) and derive requirements that cannot be met by today's infrastructure. In particular, we identify three orthogonal research objectives: (i) real-time control of tightly integrated production processes to offer seamless low-latency analysis and execution, (ii) storing and processing heterogeneous production data to support scalable data stream processing and storage, and (iii) secure privacy-aware collaboration in production to provide a basis for secure industrial collaboration. Based on a discussion of state-of-the-art approaches for these three objectives, we create a blueprint for an infrastructure acting as an enabler for an IoP.